Richard Hickock and Lowell Lee Andrews’s friendship

Dick and Lowell Lee Andrews’s friendship was an unlikely bond formed in prison and remembered most vividly at its end: Dick questioned Andrews’s motives, mocked his manner of thinking, and yet described him as one of the smartest people he had known and said he genuinely liked him. Their exchanges moved between skepticism and humor, while Dick’s account of Andrews’s execution gave their companionship the gravity of a final farewell.

A friendship formed in prison

The book describes Dick and Andrews as having become friendly while imprisoned. Their relationship took shape amid the restrictions and shared routines of the death row, where conversation offered one of the few ways prisoners could know one another. It was not presented as unbroken intimacy or easy agreement. Dick could admire Andrews and make sport of him in the same breath, and his recollections preserve both the warmth and the friction.

One point of tension emerged when Andrews stopped eating. Dick was impressed by the strength of will behind the fast, but refused to believe Andrews meant to die. Even after reports that Andrews had fallen into a coma, Dick told him that Andrews was pretending to be crazy. He interpreted the refusal of food as a performance intended to secure transfer to a psychiatric institution, rather than as a genuine attempt at self-destruction. The conviction reveals Dick’s persistent skepticism about Andrews’s stated condition; it does not, by itself, establish what Andrews intended.

Andrews answered the discussion in a way Dick later found memorable. He considered the act of starving himself a hard way to achieve anything, since, in his view, prisoners would eventually leave either by walking out or in a coffin. Andrews’s equanimity about those possibilities struck Dick as evidence of his peculiar outlook. Dick responded that Andrews had no respect for human life, including his own. Andrews agreed, then added that if he ever escaped alive, people might not know where he went but would know where he had been. The exchange joined grim talk about death to Andrews’s wry imagining of escape, and Dick afterward repeatedly recalled it as an example of what he considered Andrews’s funny, clouded thinking.

Admiration, teasing, and difference

Dick’s judgments of Andrews were never simply dismissive. He called him odd and goofy, but also said that for his age Andrews was the smartest person he had encountered, describing him as a human library. In Dick’s account, Andrews retained what he read, while knowing little about life beyond books. Dick set that book learning against his own claimed experience of hardship and danger. The contrast became part of the way he explained both Andrews’s strangeness and his appeal to him.

Dick also remembered Andrews as unusually candid. He said Andrews had never been with a woman and did not pretend otherwise. Dick contrasted that plainness with the men around them, himself included, whom he characterized as boastful storytellers who made things up to avoid feeling insignificant in prison. In his telling, Andrews refused to invent adventures simply to have something impressive to say. Dick’s appreciation of that refusal suggests that their friendship rested partly on a quality he found scarce among the other prisoners: Andrews would not claim an experience he had not had.

The bond nevertheless had boundaries. Dick said Andrews lacked knowledge of life, while Perry Smith resented Andrews’s education and the way he corrected Perry’s misuse of words. Dick described Perry as unable to get along with the other prisoners and reported that Perry had no friend on the premises. That contrast places Dick and Andrews’s companionship against a more hostile prison atmosphere; it does not make their own relationship free of mockery or disagreement. Dick, too, teased Andrews’s outlook, but continued to speak of him with evident affection.

The last exchange

Dick’s recollection of Andrews’s execution became the fullest record of their closeness. On a cold, wet night, he and Perry watched from their prison windows as Andrews was escorted along a path to the warehouse. The baseball field was muddy, the warehouse stood brightly lit with its doors open, and the gallows itself was out of sight at an angle. Dick said the men watching could see its shadow on the wall, which reminded him of a boxing ring.

At the entrance, Andrews paused while his arms were tied in front of him. The chaplain removed his glasses before he was led inside. Dick remembered the small gesture as pitiful and wondered how Andrews could see well enough to climb the steps. The quiet was broken by a distant dog, then by the sound of the trapdoor. Dick reported that Andrews’s heart continued beating for nineteen minutes; the doctor repeatedly came outside with a stethoscope and, Dick said, was crying. In the account, the execution is not distant prison news but something Dick watched unfold from the window.

Dick also recalled their goodbye. Shortly before the execution, Andrews had eaten two fried chickens, smoked cigars, drunk Coke, and written poetry. Dick and Andrews joked about whether they would meet again after death: Dick imagined they were bound for the same place and asked Andrews to find a cool, shady spot, while Andrews said he believed in neither heaven nor hell. Andrews mentioned that an aunt and uncle had arranged for his burial in a small cemetery in north Missouri, alongside the three people he had killed. Dick contrasted that prospect with his own uncertainty about whether he and Perry would be given to medical researchers. The exchange was macabre, but its ease conveys the familiarity between them at the point of separation.

As Andrews was leaving, he handed Dick a paper. Dick later sent it to the journalist he was speaking with; it contained the ninth stanza of Thomas Gray’s Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard. The poem’s meditation on the grave gave the farewell a literary form consistent with Dick’s image of Andrews as a reader and writer. Dick was unsure whether Andrews had composed the lines himself or copied them from a book, but believed he had written them. Even that uncertainty survives as part of Dick’s remembrance: he preserved the paper and offered it as a final trace of his friend.

What the friendship reveals

Dick’s portrait holds affection and ridicule together. He could describe Andrews as foolishly detached from ordinary life and, in the same recollection, as exceptionally intelligent, truthful, and likable. His repeated jokes about Andrews’s outlook did not erase the regard expressed in his stories of their conversations, their goodbye, and the poem entrusted to him. The friendship appears not as a sentimental rescue from prison life but as a connection sustained through disagreement, shared dark humor, and recognition of a distinctive character.

The final account also changes the weight of Dick’s earlier teasing. His insistence that Andrews was pretending during the fast shows how readily he interpreted his friend through skepticism; his detailed remembrance of the execution shows how attentively he had watched him. The friendship’s strongest evidence lies in this contrast: Dick doubted Andrews’s account of himself, yet retained his words, gestures, and last written message. In remembering Andrews, he preserved both the oddity he had mocked and the person he said he liked.